


like lovers do

by AParisianShakespearean



Category: GreedFall (Video Game)
Genre: Age Difference, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Smut, Friends to Lovers, Slown Burn, Tags to update
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-01-13 08:28:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21241151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AParisianShakespearean/pseuds/AParisianShakespearean
Summary: As Emilia de Sardet finds a home away from home, she sees his different parts and idiosyncrasies, and considers him, considers them without knowing that where they’ve been falling is the place where lovers fall.Moments of Kurt and Emma de Sardet, falling and learning to act like lovers do.





	1. Before

**Author's Note:**

> Woops I played Greedfall and decided I had to write a story about my de Sardet and Kurt. I was really drawn to the relationship when I played the game, and really wanted to explore how the dynamic evolved into a romance, because I saw SO MUCH POTENTIAL through the small moments of dialogue the game gave us. 
> 
> Anyway, please enjoy! :) 
> 
> (also, rating will likely change to E later.)

A week before the ship will set sail to Teer Fradee, Kurt watches as Green Blood departs the ballroom, slipping between the open doorway that lets in the cool night air. It’s a grand party her uncle has spent weeks planning, full of dancing and drinking and guards stationed at all corners per to celebrate Lady de Sardet and her cousin’s new adventures. Truly, one of the most elaborate Kurt has seen. But while Constantin laughed, danced, and overall further disappointed his father with his knack of always saying the worst thing at the worst time, Kurt sensed Green Blood was elsewhere, even before she discreetly departed. She’s always elsewhere. Few people are aware of it, but it’s true.

She leaves behind her puzzled uncle and a rather bemused noble admirer. This one is named Lancel—some skinny dandy from the Dujardin family that used to make snide comments about the mark on her face when last he and his family visited Serene. The years haven’t done him any favors—he’s still as greasy-haired as ever, and Kurt tries not to snort as he scans the room with two glasses of red wine in hand, slowly realizing the green dress in a sea of blues and reds is nowhere to be found. Times have changed. Once Green Blood told him how when Lancel first visited, Monsieur de Courcillon informed her she had to be the lady of the manor and treat her guests accordingly. Even at only fourteen she had the guile to know her family hoped she’d take a liking to him. Those hopes were dashed when their meeting went poorly. After teasing her about the mark on her face, Green Blood offered the dainty a “friendly spar,” tired the boy’s bragging about the fencing lessons he had taken. The spar ended with Lancel on the ground, clutching his side where Green Blood struck him. Unlike the dainty, who learned fencing for show, Kurt taught the Lady de Sardet how to win. Kurt saw the fight from the sides, and she mischievously locked eyes with him as she had Lancel pinned to the ground squirming. A lecture followed of course, both for him and for Green Blood. The lessons were purely for practical reasons, the prince told him. She couldn’t beat potential suitors to the ground, the prince said, while her mother informed her she couldn’t throw potential suitors to the ground. Still, it was a good day.

Kurt laughed and laughed when Green Blood later told him the full story and the stern talking to her mother gave her. He patted her on the back. “That’s my girl,” he told her, and he recalls how pink her cheeks were after. She may not have been able to spar with potential suitors at the present, as evasion and clever words were her only tool, yet Kurt would still do the same if she was near, tell her “that’s my girl,” like the time before when things were easier. She probably doesn’t remember the last time he called her that, but it’s always stood out to him, because he realized he shouldn’t call her that again.

The prince approaches. With a raising of his brows, he wordlessly orders Kurt to find her. She spoke of a grand speech she had planned, and inevitably the prince worries she won’t be around when the time comes. Nodding in understanding Kurt slips outside, past the courtyard to the small fountain and garden. It’s often been her spot, a spot to read in the early morning before training, a spot to cool off after with bare feet in the water, and a spot to escape during long parties with noble dullards. Kurt finds her sitting at the edge of the fountain, turned away from him and staring at the water. He’s careful to approach, absurdly thinking if he startles her, she’ll be so frightened she’ll fall into the fountain. It would be quite the sight, the Lady de Sardet emerging back to the ballroom soaking wet. She’d enjoy that too he thinks, even if it would ruin her finery. The green dress she wears was no small price—the latest in fashion with her own staple large bustling skirt and corseted bodice. She wears a thousand shades of green, and tonight she dons emerald. He’s seen her escape here a thousand times in hundreds of different dresses. Perhaps it’s no surprise she’s by the water now.

“I suppose my uncle asked you to come find me?”

She turns to him with a smile, beckoning him to sit next to her. He’s hit with a dull surprise that she’d know it was him behind her, and she laughs when he silently takes her side and sits at the fountain’s ledge, wondering why on earth he seems so surprised. It shouldn’t be a surprise to her after all…he’s been shadowing her for years. She’d be bound to recognize his footsteps by now.

“You have an…intense presence,” Lady de Sardet says. “Loud footsteps. Constantin is softer, but not tentative. He shuffles his feet, so I always know it’s him.”

“I didn’t know you were in the habit of memorizing footsteps.”

She laughs again, and not the practiced, quiet, and polite laugh he often hears at court. “It’s not a skill I tried to hone,” she says, laughter quieting. “but when you’re around certain people for a long time, I suppose you pick up certain things. Besides, I recall someone asserting the importance of knowing your surroundings.”

He smirks, quietly proud of himself. “You’re intuitive, Green Blood.”

“Or perhaps we’ve done this a thousand times.”

“No. You are intuitive. And you use it well.”

She keeps her hands folded in her lap. “I hope so. I…”

She’s often so sure of her words. It surprises him when she’s trails off, glancing at her hands in her lap. “What?” he prompts, thinking it’ll put her on track.

“I don’t know.”

“Well. I don’t either.”

She regards him fondly. “I’m glad it’s not just me.”

She’s always so easily paired the two of them together. As much as often reminds her of the gold he receives for being with her, she’s paid no mind and treated him with the same courtesies as she does any lord that’s graced her presence. He even goes as far to flatter himself and think she treats him better, and she actually likes his company. Her family has paid him well all these years, not her, but he knows her well enough to know she certainly hasn’t liked every noble that she’s come across. Other than Lancel there was another in particular—a certain “Clarence” from a lesser city on the continent that made her roll her eyes and search for his gaze across the court, shaking her head at him when they were seated next to each other at dinner. The lord was such a dolt he didn’t even notice Lady de Sardet wasn’t impressed. It’s true, no one knows Green Blood only leans her cheek on her hand when she’s dreadfully bored. There’s many things about her that few notice, like the way she scours her journal in private moments thinking it will give her answers, her affinity for water, and her nearly insatiable hunger for tarts and little cakes. Small things maybe, but things that make up parts of her. And she pairs the two of them together so easily, the lady and her master of arms, as if they met each other through different means, and as if he wasn’t her mentor or a hired guard. He doesn’t call her “friend,” simply because he isn’t sure he’s allowed. So, he’s taken to call her “Green Blood.”

She’s contradictions and gentle sighs. She’s delicate, but can just as easily kick him to the side. Which she has, and in times he wasn’t even trying to go easy on her as well. She’s lithe in her build from use of magic and long blades, favoring precision and accuracy over brute strength. She also tinkers with traps and other contraptions to gain edge in battle. Yet still she has remained a fair lady who admits a preference for dresses and satin shoes over sturdier boots. (“You can’t fight in dresses or satin shows Green Blood,” he has told her, and she always acknowledges she knows.) Her hair is sandy wheat, and reaches her back when it’s pulled down. Though he’s told her it should be shorter for ease, she solves that problem by pinning her hair with braids every morning. A taxing ordeal, especially every morning he’s sure, but favors her long and wavy hair. Her eyes are leaf green, and in her youth she thought the name “Green Blood” came from her eyes instead of her lack of experience. Her eyes were always alert, always contemplative, but time and growing older has left them tinged with sadness. They were always sad though he recalls, even when she was a fourteen-year-old girl and he handed her a sparring sword for the first time. He had silent hopes that the melancholy girl would evolve and have more than those small, isolated moments of laughter, but maybe small isolated moments are all they can have surrounded by what they were surrounded with. Maybe his eyes are sad too, though he isn’t sure. Being a soldier, there’s no time to sort out feelings. If one ever does anyway. He knows Green Blood has had time to sort out feelings and thoughts with that journal of hers, and yet she’s still as lost as he.

She’s going to be leaving for Teer Fradee lost, but outwardly certain. He’s sure of it. She’s always outwardly certain. When she’s there, he sees only two possibilities for what will happen when she finally sets sail: either she will remain lost, or she’ll fly. He’d bet on the latter.

He's going to miss her.

It’s why he doesn’t say anything when she gently rests her head on his shoulder. She used to do that when she was far younger. Her mother and uncle let her do it back then as they saw it as innocent, but Kurt always knew there would come a day when such innocence wouldn’t read that way anymore. Some day she would be told to stop. He never wanted to tell her that and always dreaded the day that he’d have to. He never did. The habit disappeared without his prompting. Or anyone else’s, so far as he’s aware. At a certain age she must have realized for herself that what was innocent as a young girl was improper for a young lady. There’s a swell of pride that she’d still want to rest her head on his shoulder, a remembrance of easier times. There’s ache as well. She must have been told of the arrangement and must be preparing to say goodbye. She brings back the past.

She sighs. “Ah. I suppose I should head back, shouldn’t we?”

“I think we have a little time,” he tells her, mostly so she has more time away, partly because it feels somewhat nice. “I can always tell your uncle you were hard to find.”

“That’s what we’ll go with.”

They hear clapping from the ballroom, followed by the violin. They play the Minute Waltz, Green Blood’s favorite. “It would be my last waltz before departing,” she muses, “but the thought of dancing with Lancel…”

He chuckles. “You’re much too good for him Green Blood.”

“He actually thinks I’d take him to Teer Fradee. After everything he did when we were younger…and after I beat him at sparring practice even. I suppose since my figure has shaped since we were children the mark on my face has become more tolerable.” She sighs, still leaning against him. “How can a man be so pompous, so self-entitled?” she wonders. “I know Constantin can be that way sometimes…but I suppose it’s more tolerable with family. Or perhaps it has to do with nobles…”

She peers at him, and asks what he thinks. At the interest of his job, he doesn’t comment.

She laughs at his silence. “You’ve never been like that,” she surmises.

“You flatter me, fair lady, but I’m a soldier. Soldiers—”

“Yes yes, I know,” she interjects, waving her arm dismissively. “Stop it with the cold-blooded mercenary attitude, I know you like me at least a little bit.”

She crosses her arms and looks at him with mock severity, and he realizes she’s mimicking his default stance. He smirks at her performance—it is a very good performance after all, and when the music from the party changes to that slower waltz, he realizes he can prove to her how right she is.

He doesn’t act as a noble would with a grand flourish, but he rises and asks for her hand. “A dance, my lady?”

He expected her to take his hand and lead him through a few steps. It was probably an absurd thought—all the time he’s known her he’s rolled his eyes at dancing, but he used to indulge her in allowing her to show him proper frame and a few steps when she was younger, but like resting her head on his shoulder, it disappeared the older she became. Like perhaps Lady de Sardet acting like only Emma again is her way of saying goodbye, this is his.

He thought she would want to dance, perhaps reminisce about a time when things were simpler. Instead she leaves him with a dumbfounded stare that makes him feel very hot.

“You’re going to tell me something I don’t like, aren’t you?” she asks. “That’s why you want me to dance?”

He assures her he isn’t. “Come my excellency, have a dance.”

“Kurt…”

“Sweet Lady Emilia—”

“Emma,” she corrects.

“Emma,” he says, and it’s the first time he’s called her that in a long time, “dance with me. Please.”

She outstretches her hand. She’s reluctant, but takes it after a pause. Once they’re both standing and in frame she’s dissatisfied with the way he holds her and the way he’s standing, so she takes it upon herself to move his hand from her hip to her back and straighten his posture, no longer reluctant, but eager to dance—even with a subpar partner. She leads him, lost in the music while he looks at his feet, making sure not to step on her toes. It’s always puzzled him how he seems to work up much more of a sweat dancing than spending hours in the training yard, while she’s just as poised with a blade in her hand as she is dancing. She graciously doesn’t comment on the sweat on his forehead or the awkwardness of his movements as he lets her move them along, and even asks if his dancing is to her satisfaction. From the graceful Lady de Sardet, he’d want nothing more than her satisfaction.

Even with her earlier reluctance, he never expected her to frown.

“My lady…”

Her frown deepens. “Calling me “my lady,” then by my name…”

“It is your name,” he points out.

“You and I both know it’s ‘Green Blood’ usually,” she argues, and she’s not wrong. “And then, you ask me for a dance. Kurt, what’s going on?”

“Nothing my lady,” he says quickly.

That was his mistake. “There is something. I know it,” she says, “you wouldn’t be so nice otherwise.”

He stares. “Wait. You think I’m not nice?”

“I think you’re saying goodbye.”

“Green Blood…” he stammers, trying to find the words, caught. And here he was, thinking she was doing the same.

She shakes her head. “I prefer “my lady” in times like this, in saying goodbye. I don’t understand. I thought you were going to New Serene with us.”

“I thought your uncle would have told you,” he admits.

“How long have you known?”

Only a day, he further confesses. He wasn’t too thrilled at the prospect of months at sea, but when no one told him otherwise he made plans for Serene’s guard in his absence, and even recruited a few new soldiers. One was sent to New Serene already, last he heard. Only yesterday, the commander informed him of the Prince’s plan. He had no other choice but to accept. There are others in the Coin Guard there in New Serene, Kurt continues to explain, and the prince plans on using them, while the palace’s master of arms should stay in Serene.

“But you were brought in to train Constantin and I, protect us.”

He sighs, remembering how he thought the same thing when the commander told him the Prince d’Orsay’s plans. “I know.”

“Wait. Would you rather stay here?”

He considers. He knew he wasn’t happy when he was told, and he didn’t have the luxury to wonder if he was truly outraged, even with his status and time spent at the Court d’Orsay. He told himself it was because of his age. Compared to other soldiers, he’s older than sin. He has ten years on Green Blood and has lost the excitement she and Constantin still have. He’s indifferent to the promises of Teer Fradee when she sees a whole new life ahead along with a cure for the plague, even if his correspondences speak of the prosperity on the island.

But he doesn’t want to be disappointed again. He’d tell her, but he knows what she’d say to that, as she’s been trained well at the game of diplomacy and persuasion. She’d ask if he’d rather stay where it’s dying, because it is dying where they are. They are dying on Serene and it’s an open secret. He simply can’t tell her it’s easier to remain dying where he knows it’s dying than be disappointed.  
She looks at him when he doesn’t answer, no longer swaying. For the first time he thinks he’d rather dance. It would be easier than admitting he’s lost something, easier than looking into her sad, disappointed eyes. She wants him there, expected him to be there with her, and all he can do is say he’s sorry.

“I’m going to miss you,” he mutters.

He presses his palm into the small of her back. She presses closer to him and for a moment he can feel her racing heart. But nothing could be worse than her silence.

“Your excellency?” he mutters. “I—"

“We should head back.”

She’s cold. “We don’t have to,” he says, wishing she’d look at him. You uncle won’t start twiddling his thumbs for another five minutes. We—”

“We should head back.”

When she breaks from his frame, she walks without paying any mind that he’s following behind her. So far he’s thought only of what she’ll find on the island, not what she’ll lose.  
And he. He means more to her than what he thought. It makes him wonder if she means more to him than what he thought.

They return. She turns down every offer for a dance, blind to the fact that he’s done nothing but watch her. The answer to his question, he realizes, has always been clear, ever since he gave her her name. He never gave Constantin a name. He never gave anyone else a name.

“On behalf of my cousin and I, we thank you all,” Lady de Sardet says, raising a glass before the final dance of the night. “To whatever lies ahead.”

She drinks her glass dry. He catches her eye from across the way, and when she is at last shuffled to his side after shaking hands to every noble dignitary and dainty, she pats his arm with a different indifference than she had all night with everyone else.

But unlike everyone else, she looks at him in the eye. “That’s my girl,” he says, because more than anything, he’s proud.

“I didn’t think you’d call me that again.”

He wavers. She did remember, she did. What else has she remembered? How he cleaned her first scratches and cuts? How he held her when she cried when her mother caught the plague? He sees it all, everything and always.

And yet, “be brave,” is all he says, and he hates that it’s all he can say.

“Fight with honor.”

He thinks back to the other day, when she beat him at sparring practice. It made him proud. It’s still nothing to the pride he has now.

She’s surpassed him. It should be enough—but he’s empty and sinking, and disappointed.

And then he realizes he’d rather be disappointed with the living than satisfied with the dying.

* * *

Two days after the party, he hasn’t seen much of Lady de Sardet. When he asks Constantin, he says she’s been sitting with her mother. Blindness has taken the princess, and her excellency, sweet as she is—reads to her for long stretches of time. The princess has many who can read, but says her daughter’s voice is the sweetest. Kurt leaves her be in those two days.

On the third day, he’s outside in the courtyard at the right time. He greets her with “Green Blood!” as she descends, nearly startling her.

“Now, what’s this?” he asks as she recovers. “What happened to that intuition of yours?”

He hands her an unloaded pistol and some ammo, explaining he thought she needed some target practice. She’s slow to react but eventually she follows him to the training dummy he’s set up, though she’s still bemused.

“Come on Green Blood,” he says. “And sorry I’m not as nice today, but—"

“You’re not saying goodbye anymore.”

She grins at him, loading the gun and aiming for the head. From half a dozen paces she aims and doesn’t miss, and her smirk is so self-satisfied, he has to remind her that targets often don’t stand stationary in battle.

“Well, good thing you’ll cover me if we run into on trouble on Teer Fradee, right?”

He grins. “Talked to the commander,” he explains, “and your uncle. I have been named captain, and I am to accompany you to the island, as I have been your master of arms for all these years. Your uncle personally gave me his orders to protect you and your cousin from any danger. A small price to pay for the raise.”

She regards him, hand on her hip and light in her eyes. “You can keep up that cold mercenary act all you want,” she says, “so long as you don’t say goodbye.”

Target practice and later swordplay practice is especially grueling that day. He feels bad when she’s sitting on the steps, covered in sweat and heaving, but when he offers her to teach him how to properly waltz, she waves her hand and tells him there will be plenty of time later.

“You mean to tell me there will also be dancing on Teer Fradee? Maybe I’d better tell the commander I’m more suited staying here instead…”

“Don’t you dare.”

He laughs, sitting by her side. He’s with her, and that’s the end of the that. He tells her so, and she rests his head on his shoulder again, like when he thought they were saying goodbye. This time he has no excuse—he should tell her it isn’t proper, someone could see and rumors would spread, and he wouldn’t want that for Green Blood—wouldn’t want rumors spread that she had taken a fancy to her master of arms. But he does have an excuse, one he’s almost afraid to admit, but does anyway because that’s what’s honorable.  
Simply, he likes where he is.


	2. Lessons in Humility

The journal’s blank pages wait to be filled. The front is blue and silver akin to the d’Orsay and de Sardet colors, a painted leather that’s a beautiful work of craftsmanship. Her mother had it commissioned before the departure. Emma took it with her, leaving behind a shelf of filled journals in her room in Serene. Someday she’d have to have a new journal crafted, (“Always a new one,” Kurt would say, because she always carried one around with her when she was younger.) but for the moment, all she has are the blank pages of a journal, her mother’s final gift to her, waiting to be filled on Teer Fradee.

They’ve been sailing for one month. She tires of rice and stale bread already, though nothing is worse than the high tide and the near constant rise and fall that come with it. A brief journey at sea, wind in her face and whipping through her hair would have been pleasant, but the journey to Teer Fradee is too long. One month and already she’s read all the books she’s taken with her, and already Kurt has taken Constantin’s coin purse. The new governor of New Serene cannot land on the island without any pocket change, or so Kurt reminded her cousin. Only halfway through the journey,

Constantin’s bag of coins has gone to half full, the money lost at card games with the Nauts on board. One night after Emma finished the last book, she was there below deck when Constantin refused to pay what was owed. He said the boy Jonas was cheating, but luckily Kurt had been there and intervened before any fists were thrown. With just one look that demanded Constantin keep his word and pay up, her cousin was fourteen again, cowering under the gaze of a particularly strict master-of-arms. Emma laughed at the exchange, and Constantin shook his head as he came to her. He always had the impression Kurt spoke a different language that only Emma was versed in. The truth was something she could never tell her cousin. While Constantin resented Kurt’s bluntness, thinking it too much like his father’s, Emma appreciated it. Kurt was so different from the nobles at court, who always minced words and hid, smiling in front of you while speaking ill of you behind your back. Kurt was never like that. He said everything up front. That’s how Emma knew the small moments of affection were real.

She’s hardly spoken to him since the day they’ve left for Teer Fradee. She’s seen him shadow Constantin, and in a moment of quiet below deck, he privately admitted to Emma that perhaps this “promotion” wasn’t worth it. It was a jest—Kurt jests often, yet she felt a twinge of guilt all the same. What would he have done, had he stayed on Serene? For the first time, Emma saw her master-of-arms and realized there was a vast under life beyond what she saw at court she had no inkling of knowledge of. He was a man with his own thoughts, his own wants and she had never cared to ask. Or perhaps it wasn’t that she didn’t know, but didn’t admit it. Yes, that day, for the first time, privileged, sad, girlish Emilia de Sardet realized it would impossible for all of Kurt’s thoughts to always align with hers.

Was she ashamed? Every time she thought of dancing with him in the courtyard before she made that ridiculous final speech to the court where she assumed he would go where she went, she felt very hot. Since getting on the ship she hadn’t really sought his company for that gap of time, thinking of the moments with him in the courtyard instead, and the way he looked at her when she told him to fight with honor. In the times she did see him below deck monitoring Constantin, ale eased her and made her forget. She didn’t like the taste, but she liked the way it made her feel.

But in the early at the top of the deck, it’s only her and only him.

She never expected to see him here, sitting on a barrel and reading, even if there are limited places one can be on a ship. Emma had been on the top of the deck for hours, trying to find something to draw, something to break the white of her journal. She wasn’t inspired by the line where the sea met sky, or the ship, or even Captain Vasco, whom she caught talking to one of his shipmates. She probably didn’t have the skill anyway to depict his tattoos, and for that matter, the last thing she needed was for him to stumble across her journal and see an unauthorized depiction of him, unlikely as it may be that he would. Yet after mistakenly calling his ship a boat, she wants to do the least to annoy. She also knows what it’s like, to be depicted in a way that wasn’t you. She knew better than to do that.

Once though, (and thoughts drift there involuntarily and making her blush, push back that stubborn lock of curl that won’t fit in the plait.) Emma drew Kurt. Only his hands, but in her mind, his hands were an intrinsic part of him. It was after she saw them ungloved for the first time, after a long day of training. She was nineteen then. They had used real swords before, but that was the first time he promised he wouldn’t go easy on her. He certainly didn’t. He nicked her in the shoulder when she failed to parry. “They’d do worse than that Green Blood,” he said, “they” meaning people who would want to hurt her, but she knew how bad he felt. He patched her up himself, taking off his gloves and cleaning the wound before binding it. She watched him, fascinated by his hands. She shook so many hands in her time at court, all of them soft and dainty. His were scarred, strong. She drew them later in her journal, and she felt so ashamed when she saw him the next day, she bought a new one and stuffed the old onto her shelf to be buried with the other embarrassing thoughts and drawings she made in her youth. One day, she’s sure, someone is going to walk in her room, open the checkered journal and see the crude sketches of a soldier’s hands. They’d never know and neither would she.

Against her better judgement, she approaches. “What are you reading?” she asks, and he looks up from the page, lifting up the book. She peers down so she can see the title, _The Tale of Redwin Roads._

“An adventure novel?” Emma asks, twisting her plait in her hand, pushing the wisp of hair back and feeling it fall right back where it was as it had been all day. It was a good book too, that Kurt had, as she read it to Constantin once when they were younger.

She smirks at him. “All those times you teased me for reading romances…”

“Guilty pleasures,” he replies, closing the book. “We all have them.”

“I never felt guilty for enjoying a book.”

“Suppose you’re right.”

In lieu of standing in a silence with him, a silence that she’s not sure she can handle, she asks him something as it floats to her mind, without thinking it through first. She asks if she may draw him.

His eyes widen. “Draw me? I’m hardly an interesting subject.”

She’s spoken. She must continue. “Kurt,” she says, “my mother gave me a new journal for my new adventures. Obviously there’s not very many interesting things on the horizon, but…”

“And you think I’d be interesting?”

“Please. Mother…”

She sighs, clutching the journal tight. She cried the night before, she doesn’t want to again.

Kurt realizes. He gives in. “I’ve never done this before,” he mutters. “What would you like me to do?”

“Read,” she suggests, rubbing her eyes. “That would be nice.”

He picks up where he left off, doing his best not to smirk as Emma sits next to him and crosses her legs. In her own world, free, she forgets everything until there’s nothing but lines and strokes and possibilities. She sketches Kurt methodically, takes her time as best she can against the ticking clock of the setting sun. She’s not particularly proud, the drawing is missing something she can’t quite put her finger on, but she rises and shows him anyway when she’s done. He doesn’t take the book, but his hand, ungloved, gently thumbs the pencil drawing of his sitting form, engrossed in a book.

He grins, looking up at her. “You do good work, Green Blood. That—Romney or whatever his name was—he would be proud.”

“Hardly,” she admits with a sigh. “He never taught me to draw. I taught myself.”

“Really?”

“Well, when he drew me, I watched. What else was there to do when I was cooped up for hours?”

“I thought you liked being drawn. I even heard a few paintings are on this boat.”

“Ship,” she corrects, and they share a knowing chuckle. “It’s a ship, not a boat” is doomed to be in their vernacular for the rest of their lives. Yet when Kurt asks again about the artist Laurence Romney, memories flood back, memories of the hours spent inside his studio in Serene. With his paintbrush, Emma became Circe, Eurydice, Aphrodite. Persephone saying goodbye to her lover Hades. She felt beautiful. Powerful even, posing for hours besides Laurence. Then she began to draw and paint. First it was landscapes and sunsets, then people, then eventually herself. She depicted herself as she was. There is power in that. She found it. After a while, sitting for Laurence wasn’t what it used to be.

“After a while I realized he was portraying me the way he wanted,” she tells Kurt. “He told me I was beautiful and maybe a part of me believed him, but you know, he never drew this.” She touches the mark on her face, recalling how Laurence’s eyes swept over the mark in scrutiny. “I saw him a few days before uncle’s soiree, and he wished me well. He wanted to me to sit one last time. I wouldn’t let him. Of course my uncle tricked me, he sent another artist to depict a final portrait to hang in the gallery…but Constantin saved me. Remember?”

“I remember.”

His expression changes and Emma doesn’t like it. It’s perplexing and contemplative.

She crosses her arms, considering it. “Now,” she states, firm. “Laurence and I were not lovers. Never had been.”

Kurt suddenly turns a shade of crimson. “I wasn’t…”

“Your face said a few things.”

Caught, he asks how she really felt about Laurence. Well it wasn’t love. Never was. But love breeds thoughts of another. The threads weave to Constantin. Constantin, and Bella.

“Do you remember Bella?” Emma asks suddenly.

“Yes,” Kurt says, though he’s puzzled by the shift. “Why?”

She sits, admitting it’s what she thought of, that’s all. Constantin was sixteen years old when he first fell in love. It wasn’t love at first, only a small thing—an infatuation, Kurt called it one day during training. Less blushing and more fighting, he commanded when Constantin would finally arrive, dreamy and somewhere else. But while Kurt called it infatuation, Emma called it a sickness. Never to anyone though, only herself and her journal. What else could something be called that invaded the mind, coiled and clung and refused to be let go? But it was a beautiful sickness. Constantin’s affliction even made Emma think of being hopelessly lost with it one day.

Her name was Bella. “She works at the tavern,” the also sixteen-year-old Emma told Kurt deep into it when Constantin skipped training, presumably to be with her. Then, for the first time in their history together, her master of arms blushed. Kurt wasn’t the blushing type—or so she thought before that day. Since then, he would prove her wrong many times. But back then it was just the once, so naturally, Emma asked him why he seemed so embarrassed.

“Uh,” was his garbled reply, stumbling over his words and becoming very interested in the pommel of his sword and refusing to meet Emma’s eye. “She…Green Blood…Bella is, uh…paid. For services.”

Emma was naïve, always had been and still is, but she knew what that meant, and promptly her cheeks were just as crimson as Kurt’s. Well, it wasn’t his business, Kurt said after the silence became too awkward. He only expected Constantin to treat Bella or any woman with respect, like he would order any soldier under his command. But Constantin wasn’t one of Kurt’s men, he was the son of the governor, and Constantin begged him and begged him not to tell his father he was in love with who he was in love with. Kurt wasn’t too jaded and never had been to tell Constantin it wasn’t love, but he certainly thought it. Emma could tell by his face when Constantin finally made an appearance at training and the conversation came up. Either way, Kurt promised he wouldn’t. He was always like that.

Kurt didn’t have to though. The prince found out anyway. Constantin hadn’t been careful when he set Bella up in a private room in Serene’s tavern. He didn’t care his son had a preferred woman, no, it was the fact she was catered to in a private room, Constantin spending money on her that wasn’t his. It was also the fact that he expected to marry her. After that, the affair ended with little fanfare, though Constantin made plans to get her back into his life without his father knowing. It wasn’t even six months after. Bella caught the malichor. She passed before Constantin could see her again.

Kurt was the one that told Constantin. Emma was the one that held him when he wept, her fingers stroking the ends of his pale hair. He said her arms were like home to him. He said so three times in their life. Once after Bella passed, once when they were far younger and he was hurt by his father’s cruel words, and once when he found out Emma would be the legate of the congregation. “I couldn’t do it without you,” he said, lifting her into the air and embracing her. “Your arms are like home.”

“But of course,” Emma replied. “We’re cousins. We are family. Family is home.” And Constantin told her, “my father isn’t. You are.”

Bella wasn’t spoken of often after that day, but Emma knew her cousin still ached. Perhaps it scared Emma from falling in love, and she still didn’t know if the sickness of love could be home, especially as Laurence Romney called her as such when he painted her. To him, her eyes were warm and welcoming, and he painted her with the fondness of lovers, even as she never entered his bed and he never quite entered her mind like the sickness of Bella to Constantin.

She sighs. Memories are fickle things, and ghosts that haunt the mind. Sometimes, you had to let them haunt. Kurt knows, always had. He respects.

When she finally glances at Kurt, she tells him “no,” looking at him in the eye. “We were not lovers, Laurence and I. He wasn’t home, or sickness. He was just the man that painted me because he thought I was beautiful.”

“Sickness?”

“Love is a sickness, I’m convinced,” she says. “But… it’s a beautiful one.”

“You’re a writer, you know.”

He flatters her, but she isn’t so sure, even as she holds up her journal. “Sir de Courcillon saved me when he first gave me one,” she admits. “I don’t think I’d know my own thoughts if I didn’t write.”

“You would.”

He’s so earnest. “I don’t know.”

“You’re smart, Green Blood. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

There isn’t so much sun left, but she can see the truth in his pale blue eyes. They’re usually hard and intense. Emma keeps the secret well that sometimes they’re soft.

They’re soft now.

“I’m—sorry I made you come,” she stammers suddenly, but her foolish statement is mitigated when Kurt’s expression softens further.

“I wanted to come,” he reveals. “After we talked, I realized there wasn’t anything left in Serene.”

“You didn’t leave anyone behind?”

He shakes his head. “A few people I knew before your uncle hired me already sailed to the island. And I recruited a boy not too long ago—Reiner. He was sent to the island as well.”

“Anyone else?” she mutters, and she doesn’t know why she’s afraid to ask.

“You and Constantin are here.”

A touch of brief relief she doesn’t understand. The truth however, is that she’s very aware he likes her more than Constantin. She’s Green Blood, he’s simply “your excellency.” She showed up for lessons on time. Constantin didn’t.

Either way, she had meant another sort when she asked. She was thinking of a lover. It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought of Kurt as a man before, but after he first told her he wouldn’t come with her to Teer Fradee, she recognized she had shades of seeing him as one of the court would regard someone of the Coin Guard—expendable and unmovable tools. But Kurt’s never been that to Emma, even if she was too keen on him as the master-of-arms and nothing more. So she asks about his family, knowing she should have asked before. Yet she doesn’t ask because it’s polite. It’s because she wants to know.

“I never knew them,” Kurt says with such indifference it strikes something odd in her. “They were soldiers like me,” he continues, “but it’s forbidden for a child to live with their parents in the barracks. I—”  
“What?”

“Conflicting loyalties Green Blood,” Kurt says at her stunned expression. “My mother knew that, whoever she was. I was entrusted to a wet nurse who followed the troops.”

“What was she like?” Emma finds herself asking, and his answer is immediate: she was a good woman, sweet. She smelled like crushed flowers, and Emma knows crushing flowers and keeping herbs in drawers is an old trick to make clothes smell nice. She’s uses the trick herself, sticking lavender in drawers so her clothes will be fresh. Kurt talks more about the woman, Amalia, who raised him like he truly belonged to her, at least for a time. She had brown hair, green eyes that were a muddier green than Emma’s, but kind all the same. Her skin was browned by the sun, and she wore bright red.

“Plump,” Kurt says with a fond smile. “Soft. They’re blurred memories of her, but they’re there all the same.”

“They sound good.”

“They were,” he says with a small smile, the smile fading too quickly. “But of course… they didn’t last. As soon as I could hold a sword, I was sent to training. And about twenty years after that…” His eyes sweep over her frame. “I met a fourteen year old Green Blood, who spent a lot of time reading and writing.”

There’s a twinge of pride in that. “Am I still a Green Blood?”

“To me? Yes.”

She chuckles. “Well, I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

She sits by his side, and as comfortable silence fall, she uses what little daylight she has left to draw something else. In her journal, she draws a portrait of herself as she sees herself. Hair down, eyes gazing, mark on her face plain as day because it is plain as day. “Such a pretty girl,” they would say at court, “such a shame she has that mark.” Even her mother said that. A shame to be born different, a shame to deviate. Why should it have been a shame?

Kurt peers at the page as she finishes, drawing one last wisp of curl, the one that will not stay tucked in the rest of her braid. “Looks better than what he ever did,” he says, and Emma wholeheartedly agrees.

“I…drew you, a long time ago. Before I mean. I drew you.”

“Just once?”

He continues to surprise her. She thought he would be taken aback, make a quip, but he seems almost insulted she’d find him only so much interesting to draw him one other time. As well, his lopsided, boyish grin seems as if he finds no greater pleasure than to be drawn by her hand.

“Twice now,” she replies gently, motioning to her earlier drawing in her book. “Though before, I’m afraid it was only your hands.”

“My hands?”

He glances at them, resting on his thighs. She tells him about that day, when he didn’t go easy on her for the first time and nicked her. His hands inspired her, because she looked at them and thought of them as lived.

“I should have liked to have seen it,” he says. “No one…well. No one has ever said something like that.”

“You don’t know that.”

“So confident.”

“A warrior must be. Even when she’s only Emma.”

It’s a mirror to something he once said, something he oft repeated. A warrior must be confident. She thinks he’ll remember. It’s what she plans.

Instead, he takes he outstretches his hand. His lived fingertips brush lightly through her hair, tucking that stray wisp that had fallen undone all day. Emma waits for it to come undone again, plans on it.

It stays.

“Your excellency,” he says, “I’m glad I came.”

“We’re not on the island yet,” she says. It’s a ridiculous thing to say, yet she can’t take it back and stumbles over anything that can salvage the stupidity. “You could…set one foot on Teer Fradee… have the weather there not agree with you, and then want to come straight back.”

“Hardly. There’s more money on Teer Fradee.”

“_Kurt._” She knows it’s foolish, that money drives everything and everyone—that’s what her uncle said, but she refuses to believe that of Kurt, that it’s only money. She’d never be Green Blood if that was the case. She’d never be Emma in that one brief moment, the two of them alone or nearly alone on the top of the deck.

“Should we go back down, see what Constantin’s doing?” she asks, and he snorts, shakes his head. “He can stand a lesson in humility. We can wait a while,” he decides. And since he decides, they stay for a little while longer, and that little while longer says more than his thousands of assurances it’s only ever been money.


	3. Quarrels

His royal fledglings are quarreling.

It isn’t an unknown sight for Lady de Sardet and her cousin to engage in a tête-à-tête as the nobles call it, but Kurt has never seen his highness and his Green Blood this heated in the presence of others. Constantin has never cared to fall in line with what his father has decreed as proper, so his passion on display isn’t uncommon. Green Blood however, who has always listened to the teachings of her uncle, has kept her quarrels private and her passions hidden. There’s a reason Kurt could always find her in the garden during soirees. One can’t exactly cover their mouth and shriek in an entire ballroom of people.

He remembers a few years ago, Emma escaped during a party. It was for her mother’s birthday, before they found out she had the malichor. From a distance, Kurt watched as Lady Isabell approached. It was trouble, he knew it, Isabell was always a “pest,” as Emma called her. Sure enough, they talked for a moment until Emma excused herself, picked up her red skirts, and escaped to the garden. He ventured out only until the lord prince demanded it. He came right in time. He saw her cover her face in her hands and shriek until she heard him approach. He outstretched his arms when she saw him, ashamed for only a moment. She wept in his arms. “They’re so mean!” she exclaimed, and he had to tell her she was worth twenty Lady Isabells.

“It’s not just her,” she replied, sniffling. “You have to be pretty, you have to be wise but not wiser than a man. You can’t fight and if you sit for portraits of course you sit in the nude and you’re a—”

“Shh,” he told her, un-moving, guarding as always. Careful.

“Kurt…” she muttered, “It’s the hysteria again. This isn’t normal. This…”

“Don’t talk about that,” he said. “I’d do the same thing if I had to deal with those people like you do.”

“I’m getting your shirt all wet.”

He chuckled. “Doesn’t matter Emma,” he promised, and she was alright again, ready to come back inside with a scathing comment about Lady Isabell’s footwork in the waltz.

That was years ago, and though he thought it, he didn’t call her brave. Emma won’t cry now he thinks, but Kurt watches Emma and Constantin, in their inaugural fight on Teer Fradee. It didn’t take long. Still, she strikes him as brave.

He’s aware of their various tricks. While Constantin will raise his voice and start babbling, Lady de Sardet chooses quiet. Her quiet is coupled with fiery eyes, locked onto Constantin. The mile-long stare. She was always good at it. Kurt can’t hear their talk, but she catches his eye from across the way, motioning him to follow her. She heads outside the large doors to the throne room. Constantin stops him before he can follow.

“She won’t stay,” he says, petulant. “She knows I don’t have the skills that she has…dealing with Lady Morange and the others…yet she won’t stay with me.”

“Your cousin promised the she-wolf—Siora, that she’d help her immediately.” he amends quickly, knowing his private and sometimes not so private fondness for making nicknames for others has never translated well in court.

Constantin’s brows raise. “Siora?”

“The native woman that came to the palace,” Kurt replies, crossing his arms and cursing Constantin’s poor memory. “Your cousin promised her that she’d depart immediately for the battlefield.”

“Even if she leaves now, she can’t make it in time. It’s madness anyway—the natives…against the alliance? You saw the alliance members in Serene. You know what they’re capable of—”

“Stranger things have happened highness.”

“Kurt—”

He holds up his hand, and like it used to do when he was a child, it stops Constantin’s babbling. “She’s a legate,” he explains, and Kurt cuts him off once more by reminding him that his father was the one that made it so. “And she gave a promise of help. She must leave now. People’s lives are at stake. Do you really think you saying the wrong thing and making a fool out of yourself is worse than what would happen if she didn’t do what she promised?”

Constantin stares, long and hard. “Privileged” comes to Kurt’s mind, Constantin somehow miraculously realizing that the dilemma of not having your cousin hold your hand during a soiree not the worst thing in the world. With a deep sigh, he gives his final order: “Make sure she’s safe,” before pleading that he go with her. “Please.”

It’s the “please” that makes Kurt wonder, that low and hushed plea with eyes that don’t lie or feign like they usually do. He follows the order to Lady de Sardet’s side still thinking of it. Outside the door Emma is pensive, somewhere else, and when she sees him, she shakes her head.

“I don’t understand,” she mutters, “I told Constantin on the way here I can’t always be around.”

“I know.”

“It’s not just about ensuring relations with the natives, I made a promise. Siora is waiting, and I…I…”

“Green Blood.”

He stops her babbling with a hand on the shoulder. “Shh,” he beckons as she trembles. “Breathe. You’re alright. I talked to him. He understands.”

“Really?”

“Barely,” he admits. “Go talk to him before you leave.”

She’s gone for ten minutes, re-emerging with an air of determination. She motions for him to her side, her silent let’s go. He smirks to himself. Years of him telling her better posture, you have to be quicker, and again, and she’s already taken to ordering him where to go and what to do, though if he was her teacher or not, truth of the matter was she was always the one who outranked him.

She speaks of her plans as they head outside—she told Siora to meet her by the house and then they’d be off to her village. “We just have to pack a few things, then we’ll be off,” she says. “Constantin…seems to understand. But…”

“You’re the only one he listens to, you know.”

She stops, turning to meet him. “He listens to you too.”

He recalls young Lady de Sardet, pointing her finger at her cousin and telling him “Mister Kurt is here to teach us.” She was taller than Constantin back then, but she made him seem much shorter still.

“Because you told him to,” he informs her.

“I told him the same thing about his father, but he ignored that.”

“He’ll come around,” Kurt assures.

“I’m worried. I—”

“My lady…”

He puts his hand on her shoulder. First one, then the other. It’s like before but this feels more deliberate, more intense. She has a bad habit of not meeting his eyes when she’s unsure, but when she looks at him, he sees some of that assuredness again.

“Lady Morange already has taken to you…if the soiree goes horribly you’ll be there to mend fences…explain your cousin asks for forgiveness...he’s not used to this sort…you know what to say better than I do… you’re the diplomat. It’s alright. It will be alright. You made a promise. Now let’s go.”

“You always know what to say.”

“Your master of arms was somewhat competent.”

“Don’t be so self-deprecating. It’s true.”

“Green Blood—”

“Emma,” she says. “Please. It’s never just Emma, it’s Lady de Sardet, or Lady Emilia. But I’m Emma. And yes, I know I’m also a Green Blood, but I like Emma.”

She can’t always be Emma. That’s the truth. He knows it but he doesn’t have it in him to tell her that now. So he calls her Emma, and the unseen weight she’s been carrying lifts. He follows her, and as he does, he wants to tell her she doesn’t have to hide like she does at court, or feign and put on airs. She can be act as broken as she feels, even though she’s not broken at all. She can always be Emma to him, even if she’s always, in some way, going to always be Green Blood.

* * *

He sees more Emma than Lady de Sardet as the she-wolf leads them to her clan. Unlike the sailor, who Kurt had been calling “sailor,” (“I am a captain,” the sailor said indignantly— even though he’s lost his ship, so the title doesn’t really hold.) Siora doesn’t mind the name. From what he gathers, her culture regards given names as almost like gifts from one person to the other. He doesn’t ask what it means if the name isn’t flattering one.

As they travel, he knows what would have occurred had Emma been Lady de Sardet, legate of the congregation. She would have held that quiet dignity and reserve of court, and certainly not gone off several times to explore something new that caught her eye. It was a butterfly once, an orange and black one she had only seen in books before, and a stream that had veered off into the woodlands another time. The stream did look nice, Kurt had to admit, and if they weren’t in a hurry he knew he’d have to wait for her as she waded in the water. Even just standing by the stream as Emma observed reminded him of that day, years ago, before he could even hold a sword. It was always that one memory, never anything else that he thought of. Had he been free since?

He has to live vicariously through Emma’s freeness, even if she’s not really free. But she’s new in a new place, not dying in old Serene. It was once a proud city, Kurt imagines, but the one they left behind was grey and dying. Teer Fradee is alive, and every new space brings new colors. That was what he notices, the colors, because she points them out as they travel. Reds, golds, oranges and a thousand shades of green. Of course she would notice the green. It had always been her favorite color. He’s fond of it too, he thinks.

Yet even as she has that sense of urgency that matches the she-wolf’s urgency, there’s wonder. As they rest for the evening that night, but only briefly, she says she she’s banking things in her memory so she may draw them later, and she’ll have to order new colored pencils from the continent and find different combinations to make all the new colors. Briefly as well, she also mentions Constantin.  
“I hope he’s alright,” she says, staring at the fire as he tends it.

She turns melancholy. “He is,” Kurt promises, because he wouldn’t say anything else. “Now sleep Green Blood. I’ll take the first watch.”

It’s another matter when they make it to the she wolf’s village. They were too late to make any real difference, but Emma uses her guile and asks the sister to wait to take revenge against the Bridge. She agrees to help tend to the wounded. They find several still alive, Emma helping them to their feet along with Siora, giving them the medicine and bandaging wounds. But she pauses after, staring at the remains of battle with fallen natives and Bridge soldiers with their eyes open yet unseeing, glazed over and lights in their eyes gone. He knows what that looks like. It doesn’t get easy, but he understands how to separate the living from the dead. Emma’s never seen it before. They did well in Serene to shield her and Constantin from the mass graves of plague victims, though of course they knew of them and knew they existed. It was almost too much before they departed for the island—Kurt following her around as she tended to her final affairs before they departed. He was going to warn her, but she turned the corner too late and caught full view of the coroners preparing the bodies for cremation. “I’m fine,” she said, when he asked, in just the right way that proved she wasn’t. Even Constantin’s mood couldn’t fully cheer her up later, the images burned into her mind. He said nothing, not one thing, though he had plenty of time during that long journey. What could he have said to comfort her? You’ll get used to it would have been too cold, too unfeeling, even if it was true enough for him. It fitted him though—he is cold, unfeeling. He has to be.  
Emma should be too with the world she lives in. She isn’t.

Yet he should have warned her about what she’d see before they got there, and he swells with guilt when they finally depart the battle field and she parts with a wave of a hand. He watches her as he’s accustomed to, and when she covers her mouth before bending over, long hair falling from its braid, he manages to turn his head away just in time as the contents of her breakfast spill into the ground.  
He goes over, a hand waving him away. He picks up her feathered hat from where it had fallen and hands her the water jug when she rises. Her eyes are bleary and watery.

“Don’t look,” she beckons. “Please.”

He turns his head but his peripherals still catch the noble and fair Lady de Sardet rinsing her mouth with water before spitting it to the floor. When she’s through she takes down her ruined braid. Her hands shake. She curses.

“Here.”

He speaks it without thinking, reaches for her without thinking, and smooths her hair until it’s free of tangles. Possessed by a version of him that’s ten years younger, a version that rolled his eyes yet still acquiesced to the girlish request of “Mr. Kurt, would you braid my hair,” he weaves a long plait and ties it off. It’s unruly and uneven but it keeps it from her face.  
She touches it. Her soft, green eyes thank him before she whispers it softly. He hands her the hat back. She adjusts it, Lady de Sardet again.

“Better head back,” she says, and he doesn’t see Emma for a long time.

* * *

She doesn’t talk about the battle, or helping Siora find her mother, or anything that he saw made her hands shake until they’re sitting on the steps of the embassy in New Serene. It strikes him as odd that she spent much of their journey wondering if Constantin was alright, wondering if he said something that had offended Lady Morange or a diplomat from Hikmet or Theleme…and yet barely fifteen minutes with him until she decided it was time to depart. All she did was debrief about their findings and what she intends to explore next, turned down his request for dinner and she told him she needed rest. He’d ask if this is where she intends to rest, on the steps in front of the guards, but he reframes when she makes an announcement: she’s hungry.

“Why didn’t you tell Constantin you’d dine with him then?” he asks. “He was eager to spend more time with you.” Some would have called the way he doted on his cousin endearing. He embraced her when she returned, told her she was brave and daring, and soon enough they’d start penning yarns about her like the ones they read in childhood.

“There’s some food in the pantry at home,” she says with a sigh. “Breads, cheeses…fruit. You know I don’t like stew.”

“Emma.”

“I’d have to pretend,” she says without hesitating, façade gone. The use of her name seems to unlock and unwind.

“You don’t want to?”

“I don’t want to do that to Constantin,” she says. “You heard him, he expects some tale of battle, triumph. What can I tell him? You know, stories always talk about the glories of war, those who won.

They don’t tell you about the fallen, the wounded, the bodies, the…”

“I know.”

“Oh Kurt.”

She inches closer. He peeks curiously at her hands, grasping his much larger one on the steps of the embassy.

“Gre—”

“I’m so sorry Kurt,” she says.

He sinks as she asks if he had seen that before. He nods, admitting his line of work wasn’t pleasant before he was assigned to work at the palace. “I had no idea it could be that bad,” she mutters when he doesn’t care to elaborate—with the way things are now at Teer Fradee, it’s bound to get worse.

“I should have warned you,” he admits.

“About what? That my worldview was narrow before? I think there’s some things you have to learn for yourself…like how men crumple when you shoot them…” She turns, and before she meets his eyes again, he glances again at their hands. “At least I’m not a dainty anymore.”

“You never were.”

“Stop.”

She removes herself and he’s almost sorry, but before he can think to wonder why, she speaks of the weight of her duties, the people that are counting on her, and the empty flatteries of those who seek something from her. It’s nothing, so by that line of logic, what he says means nothing as well. She doesn’t say it, but that’s what she implies when she speaks of the empty flatteries of others.

“I say what I mean,” he informs her.

She turns back to him. “Kurt—"

“I can’t say the same for everyone, but I mean it Green Blood. Everything. You’re very brave you know.”

“How?”

“You’re what you need to be when you need to.”

Though she smiles, she says, sadly, “not now.” A thousand things he could say to that, each more biting than the last. Why does she think she needs to put on airs with him? Why must she deflect a compliment from him? She’s always been that way—and when she called him out on it years ago—that he wasn’t complimenting her improvement—he changed his ways and made sure to mention her improved form and quicker reflexes. When he did, all he got was no I’m not, it’s not true. She takes her cousin’s compliments, even if she doesn’t believe them. She takes empty flatteries and yet not his sincere truths.

“Come on,” he says instead. “Let me walk you home.”

She accepts. They walk in silence, Emma staring at her feet. She thanks him when they head to the door, and before she can part with a small goodbye and a thanks, he leaves his arm outstretched, blocking the door from closing. He won’t tread into her home, but he won’t let her part to have her lonely meal of bread and cheese and go to sleep while she still believes something about him that’s not true, and something about herself that’s not true either.

“You don’t have to act with me,” he promises. You can be Emma. “And you are brave. Now…” he removes his hand, stands up straight. “Good night, fair lady.”

“Wait.”

He turns. She stands in the doorway with a newfound smirk, and light in her eyes. “Kurt,” she says, still smirking, “Thank you, for what you did.”

She motions to her hair, and he recalls his haphazard braid. “Your welcome your excellency,” he says.

“It’s Emma,” she calls.

“I know.”

“Good. Now…goodnight.”

He regards the closed door, the final note she had for him. It’s Emma, as if he doesn’t know Emma or see her always. It doesn’t escape him how lucky he is.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on tumblr for info on updates and other stories I write: a-shakespearean-in-paris.tumblr.com :)


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